I went from uninterested in this (because I don’t really care about narratology) to cautiously optimistic (after reading some stuff published after it that referenced it favorably) to just disappointed. for starters, Mendlesohn clearly hates “portal-quest” fantasy, and while she says in the intro that she took steps to mitigate her personal biases...it didn’t work, lol, and it leads her to the conclusion that the form as a whole is inherently ideologically or epistemologically...bad? evil? immoral? I don’t know, something stronger than “bad” but weaker than “evil”. she also seemed to pretty much just be bored with intrusion fantasies, and as a result the chapter on them was boring, too.
but mostly the whole book just suffers from being, well, kind of boring. the methodological notes in the introduction notwithstanding, this is mostly taxonomic, and so I feel kind of cheated — I got neither a useful formalism nor, really, the kind of careful attention to the particular language of fantasy that Samuel Delany gave us for science fiction. instead, as other reviewers have noted, the book is mostly a flood of examples without enough argument to pull them together. that the back cover notes that each chapter discusses “at least twenty books in detail” points to its rushedness rather than its actual comprehensiveness.
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